WAR of the Indies

Catching title, isn't it? Just you wait until you read on, you will be surprised what takes place in the land of Indie publishing.
Yesterday, following a recent post of mine, I had a bit of joke with a fellow blogger/author; I said I'm only waiting for one Indie author or blogger to openly diss me and he said he'd gladly help with the headline 'Bitch Editor Butchers Indies'. We had a good laugh.

Today, I was chatting away on my thread on the Amazon forum and suddenly, out of nowhere, got accused of having added inappropriate tags to a book. The accuser is an author I had a few run-ins with and after I told him I don't like his online persona, I had left in peace. Live and let live, you know? Although he agreed to the feelings being mutual, he turned up on my threads and either derailed them with a complete off-topic post or he just dumped his link in the middle of a conversation. I spoke about it here. As you can probably imagine, I was rather surprised to have such false accusations hurled at me, along with some other ramblings about a chapter I apparently sent to a friend and the response made me fall off my chair. I have no idea what this is about, but never mind. The important thing is that this author thinks I have nothing better to do than seeking out his book on the German website and add tags, or better ask a friend to do the dirty work for me. Why the heck would I do that? He seemed to have concluded it was me or a friend because I'm German and I commented on his link-dumping with: Bit random. By the way: if I really wanted to sabotage his book, I would have done so on the UK or US site, and I have plenty of friends all over the world, who could tag as if there's no tomorrow.

You see, I'm all for walking away from arguments and had he just called me a fucking bitch, I would have shrugged and moved on without any reaction, but this is defamation and a different matter. I've asked a person, who had some tagging issues in the past and she said you can hover over them to find out who added them. Well, I can't, but she looked and none of the tags said my name. Surely some will argue it was one of my friends, but believe me, they also have better things to do. I'm not in Kindergarten anymore. I'll tell you exactly what I think of you and then turn around an leave you alone. I might be loud and I rant a lot, but I don't stab anyone in the back, that's just not my style.

I've contacted Amazon.com, co.uk and de and asked for the tags to be removed and also told them about the accusations. It took bloody many hours off my day, for something I have no relation to whatsoever. If I do something wrong, I'll freely admit it and hang my head in shame; heck I even apologise if necessary, but I will not sit back and have someone throw dirt at my name.